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Nature Journal: Wild boars

Nature Journal
Published 1:27 p.m. ET Jan. 21, 2015

A wild boar feels right at home in a winter storm as snow swirls all around.(Photo: Elizabeth Ellison/Special to the Citizen-Times)

I used to be a friend of the wild boar. Its survival instincts and ability to adapt to truly rugged backcountry seemed to me to be admirable traits in any animal. In recent years, however, after some up close and personal encounters, I’ve had my attitude adjusted.

A 29-page booklet by Perry Jones titled “The European Wild Boar in North Carolina” (North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, 1959) tells the story of how the animal arrived and subsequently flourished in this region of the world.

In 1908, the Whiting Manufacturing Co., an English concern, purchased Hooper Bald and adjoining lands near Robbinsville in Graham County. George Gordon Moore, an adviser to English investors, was allowed to establish a 1,600-acre game preserve on Hooper Bald in return for assisting the company with floating a loan of $2 million.

Beginning in 1912, the preserve was stocked with eight buffalo, 14 elk, six Colorado mule deer, 34 bear (nine of which were Russian brown bear), 200 wild turkey, 10,000 English ring-neck pheasant eggs and 13 wild boar. Area residents have long referred to the wild boar as the Russian (or “Roossian”) wild boar, but Jones speculates that they actually originated in Germany.

At any rate, they were the only critters to escape from the preserve and survive for any amount time in the surrounding mountains.

Armed with tusks and an uneven disposition, a wild boar is a formidable animal that can stand 3 feet at the shoulder and weigh more than 400 pounds. (The average weight, however, is probably less than half that.)

It features a covering of thin coarse black or brown hair with silvery-gray tips. As depicted in Elizabeth’s artwork, in which a boar is standing his ground in a blizzard, their hair becomes shaggier and more protective in winter.

“One source states that the wild boar were capable of sticking their legs between the rails of their pen and actually climbing over the fence,” Jones reported. “It seems likely, however, that the majority of them chose to remain within the enclosure where they were allowed to reproduce unmolested for a period of eight to 10 years. The first time Moore and his guests set dogs on the animals, they leaped over low places in the fence rail and took off for the horizon.”

Established in 1934, the 520,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become the boars’ prime sanctuary despite extended shooting and trapping campaigns by the park service to eradicate them because of their destructive habits.

They vary in color from pale gray to brown to black. The most striking one I’ve ever seen was a young black sow weighing perhaps 170 pounds that broke into my wife’s fenced vegetable garden plot last summer. When Elizabeth started shouting at the beast to go away, the startled sow spooked and commenced bouncing off the hog wire fencing like a billiard ball before finally escaping. The fence was a wreck. It looked like a small tank had run into it on all four sides.

Roaming widely in herds, boars are omnivorous, feeding on plant matter and small animals like salamanders. The head of the wild boar is wedge shaped with a pointed snout, which enables it to root up the ground seeking underground tubers in search of food.

Troy Hyde, a veteran Graham County hunter, told Jones that a wild boar could “root up concrete, if he put his mind to it.” That sounds like exaggeration until you see areas where they have been rooting. The first time I encountered such an area, I momentarily wondered what fool had been rototilling a mountainside. Then the hog smell betrayed the culprits’ identities.

I was astonished at the extent of damage. But just how destructive they are didn’t really hit home until several years ago when they ventured onto our property — which adjoins the national park several miles west Bryson City — and went to work digging up the richest wildflower area we have. (They especially love the tubers of the showy spring species: bloodroot, trillium, rue anemone, blue cohosh, trout lily, etc.)

When we returned home after a two-week absence, my first thought again was that some fool had rototilled the slope behind the house. Then I smelled that smell and saw the hog tracks.

At that time, we had to discontinue using our gravity-flow water system because the critters decided to root and wallow in the watershed up on the ridge above the house. North Carolina wildlife officers issued me an out-of-season hunting permit to help remedy the problem, but I didn’t have enough firepower to make a stand. The pellets from my 410-gauge shotgun would have tickled a boar’s funny bone.

I never even fired a shot. After a while, they upped and left on their own. Good riddance, we thought.

But they returned a couple years later while Elizabeth and I were away teaching for a week. That time they attacked a partly buried rock wall above the house. The 60-foot-long wall had been built in the early part of the 20th century by a farmer clearing the land to plant corn. There was something living in or under the wall that the wild boar craved.

The hillside looked like several grenades had been detonated under the wall, throwing rock debris helter skelter.

And alas, they’re back again this winter. This time around they’re digging alongside the trails where the soil isn’t impacted. I have no idea what they’re after, but you’d have a hard time naming something they won’t eat. I once asked a park ranger what he baited his hog traps with.

“Sardines,” he said, pulling a can out of his pack. “They can smell them from a mile away.”

Well, they didn’t ask to be hauled from Europe to Graham County. And no one can deny that they’ve made a go of it in some of roughest terrain in eastern North America.

But you can’t really be the friend of an animal that pollutes your water supply, uproots rock walls on your property, decimates the fencing around your wife’s vegetable garden and plows up your footpaths. Even kudzu doesn’t do that.

George Ellison is a naturalist and writer. His wife, Elizabeth Ellison, is a watercolor artist and paper-maker who has a gallery-studio in Bryson City. Contact them at info@georgeellison.com or info@elizabethellisonwatercolors.com or write to P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, NC 28713.